It has been organized to showcase the world premiere of a specially commissioned Oratorio about St Rita, A Rose in Winter - the Life of St Rita of Cascia, composed by Frank LaRocca and librettist Matthew Lickona. The performance will be conducted by Dr Alfred Calabrese.

Scheduled speakers are the composer, librettist and conductor, as well as Dr Ron Rombs and Dr Kathryn Rombs of the University of Dallas, Fr Michael Digrigoria OSA, Fr Joshua Whitfield of St Rita’s Church, and myself. Titles and abstracts of the talks are on the website.

My hope is that they might commission a piece of art work to go with it. Judging from the selection on Google images when you put her name into the search engine, there aren’t many high quality holy images of her around! I like this one, which I found on the internet, but with no mention of who the artist is.